First stop – Virginia and then Asheville, NC

Okay. It’s cold. Very cold. We spend our first night at a beautiful campsite in Virginia. The stars were out in force – a spectacle last seen in rural Suffolk – but it was undoubtedly chilly.

Kirby knocked us up a campside-fire in no time. Without wanting to stress this enough, without the Hippy survivalist skills of our good friend/driver/fixer Joe Kirby, we’d probably find ourselves dead in around 5mins left alone to forage meekly for ourselves.

Bright red mushroom you say? I bet that’s real tasty. DEAD.

That water looks just about clean enough to drink. DEAD.

Those leaves surely would make excellent toilet-paper. MILD ITCHINESS. FULL BLOWN DEATH.

The true extent of our sole survival with Kirby cannot be stressed enough. He is our Mama Bird, we are his Baby Birds…. our eyes closed, our mouths wide open.

Our next stop was Asheville, NC. A well known hippy culture point, stop gap & permanent home for the spiritually inclined. Kirby found us a home to crash for the night, so we sampled home-made mead, were introduced to chick weed (delicious!) & dutifully lost ourselves around the baby goats, cats, dogs, chickens. They also had WIFI – gift of the Gods.

Having left the idyllic mini-Woodstock, we made our way to the centre of town to seek out some buskers to film. We weren’t disappointed.

After grabbing some postcards we treated ourselves to a late lunch at Mellow Mushroom. A Brighton-esq hippy hangout, where we scoffed down a double mushroom-heavy veggie pizza (oozing with truffle oil. Yum) – called the ‘Magical Mystery Tour’. Macca would have certainly approved. Probably. Hmmm, Perhaps not. I guess he’d have been the difficult Vegan friend we all secretly despise… (Or openly despise – Jess)

We eventually arrive to our campsite late in the evening. We celebrated with a delicious vegetable cashew curry & share a bottle of Guinness between us all.

Kirby then made sure there were no snakes or spiders in our tents & tucked us in for the night.